The Christening Day Murder (17 page)

“And you never heard from her again?”

“Not a phone call. Not a Christmas card. It’s true, she didn’t know I got married, so if she looked me up, I’m not in the book anymore, and they don’t forward letters forever.”

That was something I knew myself. “Did you know the apartment where she was living?”

Ginny Carpenter nodded without looking at me. “I followed her. She didn’t have a car, so I figured it couldn’t be too far. There were some old garden apartments in town. She had a place there.”

She described where they were, and I wrote it down. I didn’t think I could get much more information from her, and I had my own life to think about this afternoon, so I thanked her and put my coat on. The room had become wonderfully warm, the heat from the stove permeating the space.

At the door she put her hand on the knob but didn’t open it. “If you find her, will you let me know?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know if she wants to see me—”

“I’ll tell you whatever I find out.”

“Thanks,” she said.

A Bronco was just pulling into the gravel drive as I got to my car.

   The route to the motel where I was meeting Jack took me right back through the town where the garden apartments
were. I stopped and found the manager’s office. The woman who came to the door was too young to have known Joanne Beadles, but I tried anyway. As it turned out, she was the daughter of the former owners, and most of the tenants had lived there so long that the turnover was very light.

“She was the youngest girl that ever lived here,” she said. “Most of our people are older and stay forever. She didn’t stay long.”

“Did she have company?”

“Honey, I can’t tell you who had company last night. You really think I can remember that far back? We don’t pry as long as people are quiet.”

“I assume she paid her bills,” I said, trying another tack.

“She must have or my mother wouldn’t have kept her.”

“What I’d like to know most of all is where she went when she left.”

“I don’t know how I could find that out. We don’t forward mail or anything like that.”

“Do you think your mother might remember?” I’d come further than I expected, and I just couldn’t accept failure when I sensed I was close to success.

“I suppose I could …” She stopped, something occurring to her. “You know what? We probably sent her a check for her security after she moved. My mother never handed out a check right away, because you could find they did damage that you didn’t see at first, like scratching the floor or making holes in the walls. Let me check the book for you.”

She had been right about the small turnover, because the book she opened was marked “1957-” and no concluding date. She turned pages near the beginning.

“Here she is, Joanne Beadles. She was paying seventy dollars a month, and my mother sent her a check for sixty-five. She wrecked the paint with masking tape in a couple of places, and we had to touch it up. She moved to New York. Want the address?”

“You bet,” I said. I had my notebook open and wrote it
down. Joanne had moved into an apartment in midtown Manhattan on the west side, a neighborhood that has undergone some upheavals since the sixties, not all of them for the better.

“I couldn’t tell you if she cashed the check, but that’s where we sent it. It’s kind of a long time, isn’t it?”

“It’s a start,” I said, and went to meet Jack.

“That was worth the trip.” Jack had his arms around me, and everything, from the way I felt, to the closeness of his body, to the comfort of the hotel bed compared to the narrow, thin mattress at the convent, felt good.

“I’m glad you got here early,” I said.

“Could I talk you into a drink in the bar downstairs?”

“You could talk me into anything right now.”

“Lemme get my list.”

I laughed. It was good to talk to someone close to me, someone I didn’t have to explain my motives to. After spending days listening for hidden secrets and unintended disclosures, after taking notes so I could reconstruct conversations that might offer something new on a second or third mental hearing, it was a pleasure to engage in banter after the kind of sex that occurs when you think you can’t wait for it a minute longer. It had been that kind, and my spirits were high.

The bar was almost empty. I haven’t been to many bars in my life, although I’m not a stranger to alcohol, but from my handful of recent experiences, I’ve decided I like them better
empty and quiet than full and noisy. The TV set in this one had the sound turned off, and anyway we sat at a table where we couldn’t see it. Jack ordered vodka, Stoly on the rocks, and I got a whiskey sour, which would hold me for a long time. Then we talked a little, touched hands, kissed a couple of times.

“I got a B,” he said finally.

“In the test? That’s good. That’s wonderful. You worry too much.”

“If I don’t worry, I don’t work hard. You want me to ask how it’s going?”

“Ask away.”

“Solve the homicide yet?”

“I’m not even sure how many homicides there were. But I know whose body I found in the church. I haven’t told the sheriff yet.”

“Probably won’t make much difference unless he’s up for election. You pin it on anyone?”

“I’ve got two, maybe three suspects, but nothing holds together. There’s no obvious motive. Her name was Candida Phillips and she was a schoolteacher, just hired for the last year of the town’s existence. Her landlady told me Candy fell in love with someone that year, an older man who was probably married. Two older married men who had interviewed her for the job ‘forgot’ she worked in town that year, and one of them warned the other one I was on my way to his house. The second one, the former mayor, lied about who was teaching that year.”

“So they know something. Could one of them have done it?”

“Either one of them could have. They were both at the Fourth of July town picnic, and they were probably at the fireworks that night. It wouldn’t have been too hard to slip away, meet her downstairs in the church, and shoot her during the fireworks. I think that’s how it happened, a shot during the fireworks.”

“And then what?”

“And then he stuffed her body in the opening, sealed it up, and came back outside.”

“When did he open up the place where he was going to bury her? That had to take time. You don’t do that in ten minutes flat.”

“I don’t know. Maybe during the afternoon after Maddie’s baptism.”

He looked at his watch. “Drink up. Let’s run over there while it’s light.”

“I got you interested,” I said.

“I was interested from the start. I just didn’t have the time to think about it.”

   There were still some people milling around the town, especially around St. Mary Immaculate. On the short drive over I had told Jack about J.J. Eberling, who had to fit into this somehow, although the strongest connection I could find was the missing last issue of the
Studsburg Herald
. Whether Joanne Beadles figured into anything connected with Candy Phillips’s murder, I just couldn’t say.

We went down the stairs on the left-hand side of the church as I had two weeks earlier at almost the same time of day.

“See how the back of the church is curved? That’s why I couldn’t see whoever it was who was at the opening.”

“But you could hear him.”

I thought about it. “I didn’t really hear him moving the rock or scraping around. He must have done that earlier. What I heard was a ping, something metallic falling. I haven’t told you about that.” I took it out of my change purse and handed it to him. “It’s a miraculous medal. Look at the date.”

He whistled. “More’n ninety years old.”

“It doesn’t fit anyone who lived in Studsburg. There was only one person with the initials A.M., Amy Mulholland, and she was eleven years old at the time. She’s Amy Broderick now, and I met her this morning.”

“You really have been busy.”

We walked along the hall till we came to the opening. A few people stood in front of it, making comments on the murder. We waited till they went up the stairs and then moved closer.

“It looked to me as though her hand was pointing out,” I said. “Maybe she was clutching the medal. I think it may be what he came back for.”

“Hard to believe she could have hung on to it for thirty years, Chris. There couldn’t’ve been any flesh left.”

“Then he could’ve found it on the floor, picked it up, and dropped it when I called.”

“You called?”

I thought about it to get the chronology right. “No, I heard the ping first. Then I called, just to let whoever it was know that someone was there. That’s when he took off up those steps.” I indicated the ones just beside us.

“So he knows you were there and he knows the sheriff doesn’t have the medal or he would have said something aboutit.”

“You’re telling me he knows I have it.”

“Seems kind of obvious.”

“But he doesn’t know who I am, Jack.”

“He could have gotten your plate number.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “My impression was, he just got away as fast as he could.”

“I worry about you, Chris.”

That gave me a nice chill. I got down on my haunches beside him. The police had cleaned the opening out, scraping all the gook off the floor. Jack tried to move the stone. I could see it wasn’t easy.

“He had to have tools to open this up,” he said.

“He took them with him. I heard a metallic clatter before he ran, and there wasn’t anything here when I got here.”

“And he knew exactly what he was looking for.”

I looked at the miraculous medal. “Which means it identifies him. If I could only figure out how.”

We went up the stairs and outside. I showed Jack where
the athletic field had been, where the woods were where Fred Larkin had proposed to his wife, where Main Street was. We walked over and looked at the bridge.

“Somewhere around there, J.J. Eberling was handing out the
Studsburg Herald
that last day until he changed his mind.”

“Something made him change it.”

We left the Main Street bridge and walked back toward the church.

“Something was going on in that town, Jack,” I said. “When I met Amy this morning, she said her mother said she was sorry she’d ever mentioned that teacher. Somehow Candy Phillips was involved with someone in Studsburg, like the mayor or J.J. Eberling, and there’s a wall of silence around them. The only way I can think to break through are with people who didn’t live in town or with the children.”

“Who are now adults.”

“But they haven’t been warned to keep quiet. I’ve got Amy’s brother’s phone number. He lives near New York and he was in Candy’s eighth grade.”

“Maybe that’s the way to go.” He gave me his hand as we mounted the slope.

In the car I took out the sixth grade class picture that Amy had given me that morning and showed it to him in the glow of the dome light.

He held it for a long time, looking at Candy’s smiling face. “That’s when it breaks your heart,” he said.

Maybe that’s why I loved him.

   We found a nice restaurant for dinner, and I told him the rest of what I knew. He took down Joanne Beadles’s name and thirty-year-old address and said he’d do what he could to locate her. Then I gave him the names and Studsburg addresses of the two men who seemed to be hiding something from me, Larkin and Degenkamp, and for good measure, J.J. Eberling’s as well. I wanted to know if any of them had owned a .38-caliber handgun on the Fourth of July thirty
years ago. While he was writing everything down, he said he’d also check Candy’s pension with Albany.

Although I spent a lot of time telling him what I knew, I listened very carefully to his questions. Jack is always concerned with the kind of details I tend to push away because I can’t explain them, hoping they’ll just drop into place by themselves. The opening in the wall was a big problem for him. The stone was heavy, and although it could be moved by one person—he had done it himself as I watched—there was obvious preparation involved in using that opening as a grave. At the very least, the stone had to have been loosened before the homicide, and tools had to be used to accomplish it. Otherwise, the killer would have been gone from the picnic or fireworks for a very long time.

“Maybe he was,” I said. “Maybe they’re all covering for him.”

“But why?”

“Maybe they liked him. Maybe they hated Candy for some reason.”

“Maybe she found out something she wasn’t supposed to know.”

“Something you could kill for?”

“Chris, somebody put a bullet in her. Find out why and you’ll probably find out who. You said she may have had a married lover. Maybe she was pregnant.”

“She wasn’t.”

He looked at me without asking.

“The coroner thought she wasn’t, but I found something that really convinced me. She had an open box of Tampax in the duffelbag she carried. If you go away for a day or two and just pack underwear and socks, you don’t bother putting in your Tampax if you’re pregnant.”

“Agreed. So he wanted to break it off, and she was threatening to tell his wife.”

Mayor Larkin? Henry Degenkamp? But Ellie Degenkamp was in on the secret, whatever it was. And if it had been her husband, she wouldn’t have had to prompt him not to talk
about it. He would have known that himself. J.J. Eberling? Certainly something had happened between him and Joanne Beadles. Had it happened with Candy, too, only she couldn’t be bought off?

“I feel like I know so much and there are still so many questions,” I said.

“You do know a lot. You’re probably miles ahead of the sheriff.”

“The sheriff and I care about different things.”

He put his hand over mine. “What do you care about?”

“I’m so glad you came upstate today,” I said.

We got back to the hotel in that sweet, lazy haze that a good meal and some wine seem to conjure up. Everything I had imagined about hotel rooms turned out to be true. Somehow when you close the door and there’s nothing except that big bed and the guy you’re crazy about, the soporific effect of the wine easily transforms into a need, a slow burn, an ache to couple, even if it’s what you did this afternoon.